The Big Nowhere (34 page)

Looking around Ellis Loew’s living room, Buzz set odds:

Twenty to one the grand jury handed down beaucoup UAES indictments; twenty to one the studios booted them on the treason clause prior to the official word, with the Teamsters signing to take their place inside twenty-four hours. If he convinced Mickey to make book on the proceedings, he could lay a bundle down and get well on top of Howard’s bonus. Because the action in Loew’s little command post said the Pinkos were buying one-way tickets for the Big Fungoo.

Except for tables and chairs set aside for clerks, all the furniture had been removed and dumped in the back yard. Filing cabinets filled with friendly witness depositions covered the fireplace; a corkboard was nailed to the front window, space for reports from the team’s four investigators: M. Considine, D. Smith, T. Meeks and D. Upshaw. Captain Mal’s stack of interrogation forms—questions tailored to individual lefties, delivered and notarized by City Marshals—was thick; Dudley’s field summaries stacked out at five times their width—he had now turned fourteen hostiles into groveling snitch friendlies, picking up dirt on over a hundred snitchees in the process. His own reports comprised six pages: Sammy Benavides porking his sister, Claire De Haven skin-popping H and Reynolds Loftis as a homo bar hopper, the rest padding, all of it snoozeville compared to Mal’s and Dudley’s contributions. Danny Upshaw’s stuff ran two pages—eavesdrop speculation and necking with Pinko Claire—him and the kid were not exactly burning down barns in their effort to destroy the Communist Conspiracy. There were tables with “In” and “Out” baskets for the exchange of information, tables for the photographic evidence Crazy Ed Satterlee was accumulating, a huge cardboard box filled with cross-referenced names, dates, political organizations and documented admissions: Commies, pinkers and fellow travelers embracing Mother Russia and calling for the end of the U.S.A. by means fair and foul. And—across the broadest stretch of bare wall—Ed Satterlee’s conspiracy graph, his grand jury thumbscrew.

In one horizontal column, the UAES brain trust; in another, the names of the Communist front organizations they belonged to; in a vertical column atop the graph the names of friendly witnesses and their “accusation power” rated by stars, with lines running down to intersect with the brainers and the fronts. Each star was Satterlee’s assessment of the number of days’ testimony a friendly was worth, based on the sheer power of time, place and hearsay: which Pinko attended where, said what, and which recanted Red was there to listen—a brain-frying, mind-boggling, super-stupendous and absolutely amazing glut of information impossible to disprove.

And he kept seeing Danny Upshaw smack in the middle of it, treading shit, even though the kid was on the side of the angels.

Buzz walked out to the back porch. He’d been brainstorming escape routes under the guise of writing reports for hours; three phone calls had fixed Audrey’s skimming spree. One was to Mickey, handing him a convoluted epic on how a bettor skimmed an unnamed runner who was screwing the bettor’s sister and couldn’t turn him in, but finally made him cough up the six grand he’d welched—the exact amount Audrey had grifted off the Mick. The second was to Petey Skouras, a tight-lipped runner who agreed to play the lovesick fool who finally made good to his boss for a cool grand—knowing Johnny Stompanato would come snouting around for the name Buzz wouldn’t give on, find him acting hinky and pound a confession out of him—the returned cash his assurance that that was his only punishment. The third was to an indy shylock: seven thousand dollars at 20 percent, $8,400 due April 10—his woman out of trouble, his gift for her grief: Gene Niles with his face blown off on her bed. Seven come eleven, thank God for the Commie gravy train. If they didn’t succumb to the hots for each other, he and his lioness would probably survive.

The kid was still the wild card he didn’t know how to play.

It was twelve hours since he’d prowled Niles’ pad. Should he go back and make it look like Niles hightailed it? Should he have planted some incriminating shit? When the fucker was missed, would LAPD fix on him as a Dragna bad apple and let it lie? Would they make him for the bomb job and press Mickey? Would they assume a snuff and go hog-wild to find the killer?

Buzz saw Dudley Smith and Mike Breuning at the back edge of the yard, standing by Ellis Loew’s couch, left out in the rain because the DA put business before comfort. A late sun was up; Dudley was laughing and pointing at it. Buzz watched dark clouds barrelling in from the ocean. He thought: fix it, fix it, fix it, be a fixer. Be what Captain Mal told the kid to be.

Be a policeman.

Danny unlocked his door and tapped the wall light. The blood W’s he’d been seeing since the morgue became his front room, spare and tidy, but with something skewed. He eyed the room in grids until he got it: the rug was puckered near the coffee table—he always toed it smooth on his way out.

He tried to remember if he did it
this
morning. He recalled dressing as Ted Krugman, nude to leather jacket in front of the bathroom mirror; he remembered walking outside thinking of Felix Gordean, Mal Considine’s “Lean on him, Danny” ringing in his ears. He did not remember his methodical rug number probably because Teddy K. wasn’t the meticulous type. Nothing else in the room looked askew; there was no way in the world HE would break into a policeman’s apartment…

Danny thought of his file, ran for the hall closet and opened the door. It was there, pictures and paperwork intact, covered by wadded-up carpeting puckered just the right way. He checked the bathroom, kitchen and bedroom, saw the same old same old, sat down in a chair by the phone and skimmed the book he’d just bought.

The Weasel Family—Physiology and Habits
, hot off a back shelf at Stanley Rose’s Bookshop.

Chapter 6, page 59: The Wolverine.

A 40- to 50-pound member of the weasel family indigenous to Canada, the Pacific Northwest and the upper Midwest; pound for pound, the most vicious animal on earth. Utterly fearless and known for attacking animals many times its size; known to drive bears and cougars from their kills. A beast that cannot stand to watch other creatures enjoying a good feed—often blitzing them just to get at what remained of their food. Equipped with a highly efficient digestive system: wolverines ate fast, digested fast, shit fast and were always hungry; they possessed a huge appetite to match their general nastiness. All the vicious little bastards wanted to do was kill, eat and occasionally fuck other members of their misanthropic breed.

W

W

W

W

W

W

W

W

The Wolverine.

Alter ego of a biting, gouging, raping, flesh-eating killer of immense hunger: sexual and emotional. A man who possessed total identification with an obscenely rapacious animal, an identity he has assumed to right old wrongs, animal mutilations the specific means,
his specific inner reconstruction of what was done to him
.

Danny turned to the pictures at the back of the book, ripped three wolverine shots out, dug through his file for the 2307 blood pics and made a collage above the bed. He tacked the awful weasel thing in the middle; he shone his floor lamp on the collection of images, stood back, looked and thought.

A fat, shuffle-footed creature with beady eyes and a thick brown coat to ward off the cold. A slinky tail, a short, pointed snout, sharp nails and long, sharp teeth bared at the camera. An ugly child who knew he was ugly and made up for it by hurting the people he blamed for making him that way. Snap flashes as the animal and 2307 merged: the killer was somehow disfigured or thought he was; since eyewitnesses tagged him as not facially marred, the disfigurement might be somewhere on his body. The killer thought he was ugly and tied it to sex, hence Augie Duarte slashed cheek to bone with his thing sticking out his mouth. A big snap, all instinct, but feeling gut solid: HE knew the burned-face burglar boy, who was too young to be the killer himself; HE drew inspiration or sex from his disfigurement—hence the facial slashing. Zoot stick assaults were being tapped at station houses citywide; car thief MO’s were being collated; he told Jack Shortell to start calling wild-animal breeders, zoo suppliers, animal trappers and fur wholesalers, cross-reference them with dental tech and
go
. Burglar, jazz fiend, H copper, teeth maker, car thief, animal worshiper, queer, homo, pederast, brunser and devotee of male whores. It was there waiting for them, some fact in a police file, some nonplussed dental worker saying, “Yeah, I remember that guy.”

Danny wrote down his new impression, thinking of Mike Breuning bullshitting him on the Augie Duarte tail, the other tails probably horseshit. Breuning’s only possible motive was humoring him—keeping him happy on the homicide case so he’d be a good Commie operative and keep Dudley Smith happy on his anti-Red crusade. Shortell had called the other three men, warned them of possible danger and was trying to set up interviews: the only cop he could trust now, Jack would be tapping into Dudley’s “boys” to see if the three Gordean “friends” had ever been under surveillance at all. He himself had stuck outside Gordean’s agency trawling for more license plates, more potential victims, more information and maybe Gordean alone for a little strongarm—but the carport had stayed empty, the pimp hadn’t showed and there was no traffic at his front door—rain had probably kept the “clients” and “friends” away. And he’d had to break the stakeout for his date with Claire De Haven.

A thud echoed outside the door—the sound of the paperboy chucking the
Evening Herald
. Danny walked out and picked it up, scanning a headline on Truman and trade embargoes, opening to the second page on the off-chance there was an item on his case. Another scan told him the answer was no; a short column in the bottom right corner caught his attention.

Danny put the paper down, stunned. Hartshorn was Duane Lindenaur’s extortionee in 1941; Felix Gordean said that he attended his parties and was “unlucky in love and politics.” He never questioned the man for three reasons: he did not fit the killer’s description; the extortion was nearly nine years prior; Sergeant Frank Skakel, the investigating officer on the beef, had said that Hartshorn would refuse to talk to the police regarding the incident—and he stressed old precedents. Hartshorn was just another name in the file, a tangent name that led to Gordean. Nothing about the lawyer had seemed wrong; aside from Gordean’s offhand “politics” remark, there was nothing that tagged him as having a yen for causes, and there were no notations in the grand jury file on him—despite the preponderance of Sleepy Lagoon information.
But he was questioned by a member of the grand jury team
.

Danny called Mal Considine’s number at the DA’s Bureau, got no answer and dialed Ellis Loew’s house. Three rings, then, “Yeah? Who’s this?”, Buzz Meeks’ okie twang.

“It’s Deputy Upshaw. Is Mal around?”

“He’s not here, Deputy. This is Meeks. You need somethin’?”

The man sounded subdued. Danny said, “Do you know if anybody questioned a lawyer named Charles Hartshorn?”

“Yeah, I did. Last week. Why?”

“I just read in the paper that he killed himself.”

A long silence, a long breath. Meeks said, “Oh shit.”

Danny said, “What do you mean?”

“Nothin’, kid. This on your homicide case?”

“Yes. How did you know that?”

“Well, I braced Hartshorn, and he thought I had to be a Homicide cop, ’cause a guy who tried to shake him down on his queerness years ago just got bumped off. This was right around when you joined up with us, and I remembered somethin’ about this dink Lindenaur from the papers. Kid, I was a cop for years, and this guy Hartshorn wasn’t holdin’ nothin’ back ’cept the fact he likes boys, so I didn’t tell you about him—I just figured he was no kind of suspect.”

“Meeks, you should have told me anyway.”

“Upshaw, you gave me some barter on the old queen. I owe you on that, ’cause I had to rough him up, and I bought out by tellin’ him I’d keep the Homicide dicks away. And kid, that poor sucker couldn’t of killed a fly.”

“Shit! Why did you go talk to him in the first place? Because he was connected to the Sleepy Lagoon Committee?”

“No. I was trackin’ corroboration dirt on the Commies and I got a note said Hartshorn was rousted with Reynolds Loftis at a fruit bar in Santa Monica in ’44. I wanted to see if I could squeeze some more dirt on Loftis out of him.”

Danny put the phone to his chest so Meeks wouldn’t hear him hyperventilating, wouldn’t hear his brain banging around the facts he’d just been handed and the way they
might just really play:

Reynolds Loftis was tall, gray-haired, middle-aged.

He was connected to Charles Hartshorn, a suicide, the blackmail victim of Duane Lindenaur, homicide victim number three.

He was the homosexual lover of Chaz Minear circa early ’40s; in the grand jury psychiatric files, Sammy Benavides had mentioned “puto” Chaz buying sex via a “queer date-a-boy gig”—a possible reference to Felix Gordean’s introduction service, which employed snuff victims George Wiltsie and Augie Duarte.

Last night in darktown, Claire De Haven had been all nerves; the killer had picked up Goines on that block and a hop pusher at the Zombie had addressed her. She sloughed it off, but was known to the grand jury team as a longtime hophead. Did she procure the junk load that killed Marty Goines?

Danny’s hands twitched the receiver off his chest; he heard Meeks on the other end of the line—“Kid, you there? You there, kid?”—and managed to hook the mouthpiece into his chin. “Yeah, I’m here.”

“There something you ain’t tellin’ me?”

“Yes—no—fuck, I don’t know.”

The line hung silent for good long seconds; Danny stared at his wolverine pinups; Meeks said, “Deputy, are you tellin’ me Loftis is a suspect for your killin’s?”

Danny said, “I’m telling you
maybe
. Maybe real strong. He fits the killer’s description, and he…fits.”

Buzz Meeks said, “Holy fuckin’ dog.”

Danny hung up, thinking he’d kissed Reynolds Loftis in his mind—and he liked it.

Krugman into Upshaw into Krugman, pure Homicide cop.

Danny drove to Beverly Hills, no rear-view trawling. He Man Camera’d Reynolds Loftis wolverine slashing; the combination of 2307 pictures, Augie Duarte’s body and Loftis’ handsome face rooting in gore had him riding the clutch, shifting when he didn’t need to just to keep the images a little bit at bay. Pulling up, he saw the house lights on bright—cheery, like the people inside had nothing to hide; he walked up to the door and found a note under the knocker: “Ted. Back in a few minutes. Make yourself at home—C.”

More nothing to hide. Danny opened the door, moved inside and saw a writing table wedged against a wall by the stairwell. A floor lamp was casting light on it; papers were strewn across the blotter, a leather-bound portfolio weighing them down, nothing to hide blinking neon. He walked over, picked it up and opened it; the top page bore clean typescript: “MINUTES AND ATTENDANCE, UAES EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE, 1950 MEETINGS.”

Danny opened to the first page. More perfect typescript: the meeting/New Year’s party on 12/31/49. Present—scrawled signatures—were C. De Haven, M. Ziffkin, R. Loftis, S. Benavides, M. Lopez, and one name crossed out, illegible. Topics of discussion were “Picket Assignments,” “Secretary’s Report,” “Treasurer’s Report” and whether or not to hire private detectives to look into the criminal records of Teamster picketers. The soiree commenced at 11:00 P.M. and ended at 6:00 A.M.; Danny winced at the gist: the ledger could be construed as an alibi for Reynolds Loftis—he was here during the time Marty Goines was snatched and killed—and the minutes contained nothing at all subversive.

Too much nothing to hide.

Danny flipped forward, finding a meeting on 1/4/50, the same people in attendance during the time frame of the Wiltsie/Lindenaur killings, the same strange crossout, the same boring topics discussed. And Loftis was with Claire last night when Augie Duarte probably got it—he’d have to check with Doc Layman on the estimated time of death. Perfect group alibis, no treason on the side, Loftis not HIM, unless the whole brain trust was behind the killings—which was ridiculous.

Danny stopped thinking, replaced the ledger, jammed his jumpy hands into his warm leather pockets. It was too much nothing to hide, because there was nothing to hide, because none of the brain trusters knew he was a Homicide cop, Loftis could have forged his name, a five-time corroborated alibi would stand up in court ironclad, even if the alibiers were Commie traitors, none of it meant anything, get your cases straight and identities straight and be a policeman.

The house was getting hot. Danny shucked his jacket, hung it on a coatrack, went into the living room and pretended to admire the poster for
Storm Over Leningrad
. It reminded him of the stupid turkeys Karen Hiltscher coerced him to; he was making a note to lube her on 2307 when he heard, “Ted, how the hell are you?”

HIM.

Danny turned around. Reynolds Loftis and Claire were doffing their coats in the foyer. She looked coiled; he looked handsome, like a cultured blood sport connoisseur. Danny said, “Hi. Good to see you, but I’ve got some bad news.”

Claire said, “Oh”; Loftis rubbed his hands together and blew on them, “Hark, what bad news?”

Danny walked up to frame their reactions. “It was in the papers. A lawyer named Charles Hartshorn killed himself. It said he worked with the SLDC, and it implied he was being hounded by some fascist DA’s cops.”